William Boyd - A Good Man in Africa

He looked quickly about him before running up the steps at the side of the building to the first floor communal passageway at the back. He took out his key and opened the door. The first thing he noticed was the smell of cigarette smoke and his tetchy mood sparked into anger as he had expressly banned Hazel from smoking now that he had given it up himself. The room was also dark as the shutten were closed. He groped for the light switch and flicked it down. Nothing happened.

‘Nevah powah for heah,’ said a voice.

Morgan jumped, alarm making his heart pound. ‘Who the hell is that?’ he demanded angrily, peering in the direction of the voice, and, as his eyes became accustomed to the murk, made out a figure sitting at the table. ‘And where’s Hazel for God’s sake?’ he continued in the same outraged tone, stamping across the room and throwing open the shutters.

He turned round. The unexpected visitor was a lanky black youth wearing a yellow shirt open to the waist and disgustingly tight grey trousers. He was also smoking a cigarette and wearing sunglasses. He raised a pale brown hand in Morgan’s direction.

‘Howdy,’ he said. ‘I’m Sonny.’

‘Oh yes?’ Morgan said, still fuming. He opened the door of the bedroom. Hazel’s cheap clothes lay scattered everywhere. He heard the sounds of splashing from the small bathroom. ‘It’s me!’ he bellowed and shut the door.

Sonny had risen to his feet. He was very tall and slim and he stared moodily down at the street below, smoke curling from his cigarette. He was wearing, Morgan noticed, very pointed brown shoes.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ Sonny drawled, the mid-Atlantic tones grating on Morgan’s ear. ‘Nice place you got for Hazel.’ Morgan made no comment: Hazel had some explaining to do. Sonny glanced at his watch face on the inside of his wrist. ‘Ah-ah,’ he said, dropping his pose, ‘six o’clock done come. I must go.’ He loped to the door. ‘Thanks for the beer,’ he said, ‘so long,’ and he slipped out.

Morgan noticed two empty bottles of Star beer on the table. He strode to the kitchen and slammed open the fridge door. One bottle left. He calmed down slightly. If that bitch had given Sonny-boy all the beer, he told himself, he’d have strangled her. Then his face darkened. He asked himself what the bloody hell that lanky spiv had been doing in his flat anyway? Drinking his beer while Hazel washed. Muttering threateningly he poured himself a glass from the remaining bottle and went back to the bedroom door. ‘Hurry up,’ he shouted. He sat down on the plastic settee and stretched his legs out in front of him. He took a long draught of the beer and its chill briefly made his temples ache. He gazed possessively round the room. It had cost him a lot, but it was worth it to get Hazel out of the rancid hotels she had lived in previously. He wanted her away from the bars and the clubs, somewhere he knew she’d be, somewhere discreet where he could get hold of her when he wanted. Selim, the Lebanese boutique owner from whom he rented the flat could be trusted to keep what little he knew, or guessed, to himself.

The flat was small and crudely finished to the normal standards of Kinjanjan masonry and housefitting. Bare concrete walls with loose, fizzing light switches and waist-high electric points; angled door and window frames with sophisticated jamming potential, tapered skirting boards and so on, but at least it was a home of sorts. Hazel had placed a purple rush that on the terrazzo flooring but that was her sole contribution to the decor. Apart from the settee upon which he was now sitting the only other furniture Selim had supplied was a formica table with spavined aluminium legs and two steel-tube and canvas chairs of the sort that are normally seen stacked against the walls of assembly halls. The cramped kitchenette at one end of the main room contained a sink, a Calor-gas stove and a fridge. The only item Morgan had contributed to his love nest was a large standard fan which normally stood in the bedroom, gently rotating to and fro, blasting a steady stream of cool air onto the bed. Suddenly the lights went on, the fridge shuddered and started to grumble softly away.

Hazel walked into the room. She wore a threadbare pink towel wrapped around her body and secured beneath her armpits. She was without her wig and her short woolly cap of hair glistened with water droplets. She was a pretty girl with a light brown face and pointed chin. Her lips were large and her nose small and wide, only her eyes marred the classic negroid aspect of her features. They were thin and almond shaped and gave her a strange uncertain suspicious look. She was small with heavy breasts and hips and thin-calved legs. Her toes were bunched and buckled from the fashionable shoes she crammed her broad feet into. In the interests of gaudy sophistication she had plucked her eyebrows away to tiny apostrophe marks. In his less charitable moments Morgan accused her of being flighty and unashamedly venal — she had two illegitimate children who lived with her family back in her native village and of whom she rarely talked. She spoke instead of clothes and status, her two main interests in life, and Morgan fully realized that a white lover and this flat represented a leap of several rungs on this unpredictable ladder.

He had met her at a party at the university where she told him that at one time she’d been a primary school teacher, a career which he suspected she’d abandoned for casual prostitution, though he recognized that the term carried little opprobrium out here, as was witnessed by the unconcern over her two bastards. For all his cynical evaluation Hazel was necessary to him, more so now than ever, he realized, as a boost to his tottering ego and a source of reliable uncomplicated sex. At least, that was the plan, and he treated her selfishly and imperiously in the pursuance of it. But, somehow, it had never really worked out; the expected satisfaction had not materialized and he was faced with the growing suspicion these days that things were in reality running along some subtle scheme of Hazel’s devising and that it was he not her who was being exploited; a feeling that the unexplained presence of people like Sonny in his life only served to emphasize.

He noticed that she was holding an unlighted cigarette in her hand.

‘Can you give me a light?’ she asked as if he were a stranger.

Morgan sighed inwardly. He’d have to put a stop to this now. He stood up. ‘Look, I told you, no smoking.’

The cigarette drooped between her lips. ‘You have never come for three days,’ she said sulkily. ‘What am I supposed to do? And then you tell my guest to go,’ she added accusingly.

‘I didn’t tell him, he just went,’ Morgan said, then, wondering why he felt he had to defend himself, burst out: ‘Anyway, I don’t give a good God damn. When I give up smoking you do too, and no questions asked. What do you think it’s like for me to kiss you?’

She looked coy at this.

‘And,’ Morgan went on, ‘who was your ‘guest’ anyway? Sonny or whatever.’

She put the cigarette down on the table and secured the tuck in her towel. ‘It was my brother,’ she said flatly. Morgan felt his indignation seeping away. He tried to keep his eyes off the way her large breasts splayed beneath the towel, tried to ignore the tickle in his groin; he had to see this out first.

‘I thought you said you had no brothers.’

‘Yes, from my mother. This is same father different mother.’ She looked at him unperturbed. Morgan considered the veracity of her story: there was no way he could compete under these circumstances.

‘All right,’ he said grudgingly, ‘but I don’t want him to come here again, OK?’

♦

Morgan dropped the condom in the tin waste-paper basket under the sink in the bathroom. He was still being cautious. Murray had told him to ‘use the sheath at all times’. It was typical of Murray to call it a sheath, he thought; he could still hear the man’s dry Scottish accent. It was typical also, he reflected bitterly, how Murray’s influence reached into the most private areas of his life. He shook his head in resigned disbelief, it was uncanny how it happened. But also he was still not entirely happy with Hazel’s explanation of Sonny’s presence and he didn’t feel like taking any chances. He always expected Hazel to make a fuss about him using contraceptives and the implications they had, especially as he had forced her to go on the pill a couple of months ago, but she had made no visible sign or comment as he had laboriously rolled it down over his flagging erection. The fan had been turned up to full and had swept the bed with cool draughts, drying the sweat on his buttocks and back.